English Language And Its Effect On Programming? 709
jasno asks: "I've been wondering lately about the effects that the English language has had on programming languages. Have the limitations/ambiguities/peculiarities of the English language changed how we might have created, for instance, C if we spoke, perhaps, Swahili? Since English is my only language I'm curious to see what my multilingual companions have to say about this." Interesting thought. What would Perl be like if it was coded by a native Japanese speaker?
Error Messages of the World (Score:2)
Japan: Most unworthy computer has failed to compile honorable source code and will now commit seppuku. Please accept this gift of core dump with most sincereful apologies.
German: Scheisskopf! Dein Syntax ist Verboten! Get in der shower! Raus! RAUS!
Esperanto: Erro sintactico. Dumpoj coro automatico en bucketoj bito.
French: Eh.
--
too sexy for my login
Re:English (Score:2)
Re:Languages without nouns (Score:2)
As you can see, there are 2 "nouns" ("2" and "3") and one "verb" ("+") RPN is hardly non-noun.
I don't think a Forth programmer would agree. The action of something like 2 is to push the value 2 on to the stack. In Forth you can even make it explict if you want;
The idea that everything is a verb, that is that every executable thing is pure action is important to the understanding of stack based machines, virtual or otherwise. At some level of execution this must be literally true for any program running on a computer but some computer languages hide the fact better.If natural language is different then natural language is just plain wrong. :)
Bruce Walzer
bwalzer@lark.NOgawdSPAM.mb.ca
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
Example:
"Bill Clinton" and "Ronald Regan" are both nouns. A "pointer" for them could be "President of the United States". The current state of "President of the United States" (vs "former President of the United States") can only refer to one of them. The pronoun "He" OTOH could be either.
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
The basic components are there (Verbs, nouns, etc.) but they are typically very limited (ever see a pronoun in C?). Also, the sentence structure is *very* ridgid. (Unlike English which allows movement of objects and adjectives or even the removal of the subject!)
Although keywords tend to be english based, structure isn't and that is just as key to learning (and using) a language as the other elements. Just hope the standards aren't "influenced" by other languages the way natural languages have been. Can you imagine C after it "borrows" a few verbs (function calls) from say smalltalk?
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:2)
I have heard that if you speak Chinese and English, you can communicate with one out of every two people on the planet.
So I would expect that your second statement is true.
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:2)
Anyway, Mandarin is the official language and I think that 90% of Chinese understand it at least partially, and can speak some too
This is how I understand it. I could be wrong.
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:2)
As far as I am aware (I have worked with Japanese people, but never in Japan) English is used as the main language for business and engineering communication. This is common throughout the world, including parts of Europe.
At college, there were many Chinese (who would speak Mandarin) and Greeks (speaking Greek) but use English for technical terms, so it was perfectly possible to follow their conversation :0) In fact, it was common to see a lab team speaking several languages at once and still work together.
Re:A Linguistics Perspective (Score:2)
One might call AppleScript's "the result" a pronoun as well, even though it's a noun in English.
Object-oriented languages frequently have a personal pronoun, "self" or "this", by which an object may refer to itself. Again, these may not be pronouns in English, but they act as such in OOP languages that use them.
Perl permits reordering of conditional statements, which has no programmatic effect but changes the emphasis of the statement when read by a human:if ($foo) { bar(); }
bar() if ($foo);
bar() unless (! $foo);
($foo) && bar;
Also, Perl permits dropping of the object in many expressions where it can be assumed to be $_ (or @_ or @ARGV in the case of shift and the like), though this strikes me as more similar to the Japanese zero pronoun than to anything in English.
There is no bearing. (Score:2)
There is a huge gap between the complexity of the structure of programming languages and of natural languages.
Telegraph code in Japanese (Score:2)
Radio and telegraphic code would not have carried any of the ambiguity of the written language.
Written orders used the whole character set, but I doubt it was genuinely that ambiguous. I might understand a few errors made that way, but not systematically.
Re:chomsky... (OFFTOPIC) (Score:2)
He's been at MIT since the 1950's. What leads you to think a liberal (or even a real Marxist, which Chomsky certainly isn't) can't be a tech? Serious, hardcore biology is still dominated by Marxists and far leftists. There is still no such thing as a conservative linguistics department.
Don't mix his crappy linguistics with his crappy politics. Chomsky is careful not to, and those among his detractors who have mixed them generally make asses of themselves.
Re:Word Order (Score:2)
I suspect that there might be more use of quasi-morphology in programming languages if a more morphologically rich language like Russian or Japanese dominated things, although there's plenty of pseudomorphological constructs in C. For example, the distinction between printf, fprintf, sprintf, and wsprintf could be viewed as a matter of morphology.
Re:your sig (Score:2)
Of course, the original authors of the software do not have to be the ones offering the support services; that could be done by a separate cadre of workers from a Professional Services Department. This seems to work well for things like initial installation and configuration, systems administration, maintenance and upgrades, and for problems arising from user error. Insofar as you can find competent people willing to do this work, it is a good idea, because it does save programmers' time. When you get down to bugs in the actual software, though, it really helps to get support straight from the horse's mouth. This is, of course, exactly the support model that free software projects have adopted through mailing lists and IRC channels. In my work in the industry, I've found that most hackers take pride in their creations and genuinely want to make them better, and that they do this best (and most time-efficiently!) when they can communicate directly with end-users. I'm proud to say that my company takes this approach with its BSD-licensed products. Mainly we use free, public mailing lists for this purpose.
As a software engineer, I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is. Support may not be fun, but it is vital to the usability of software, and it really does help you find bugs and fix them. I agree wholeheartedly with Eric Raymond: The software industry is a services industry that thinks it is a manufacturing industry. Support is what most people will really pay for, and it pays for free software development.
Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Re:Maybe it's like singing... (Score:2)
Re:Speak english (Score:2)
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:2)
However, as a system the Latin alphabet is made up of very few visual elements. Circle, hump, ascending stick, descending stick, and the occasional diagonal line pretty much make up the lowercase alphabet.
Chinese characters are made up of a far larger array of elements (the 216 "radicals" are but a condensed subset) which make scanning much more efficient for those who are literate.
Not only that, but most Japanese can easily recognise 4 different systems of writing: Latin, two indigenous syllabaries, and about 6000 Chinese characters.
It has been mentioned on this thread that there are only about 2000 characters officially designated by the government as necessary. This is technically true. However, I have in front of me a novel from the 1890's that most Japanese College students would be expected to be able to read. On the first page, I'd say 25% of the characters are on that list of 2000.
Re: No, really. (Score:2)
When it isn't being spoken by native Cantonese speakers that is.
The inversed question is even more true (Score:2)
I have a worse problem where programming affects my english.
I'm a french-speaking Quebecer (the term would be "francophone"). My english was mostly influenced by US TV shows and english books on all sorts of subject, but mostly technical and programming -oriented. My pronounciation was also (and probably mostly) influenced by anglophones here in Montreal (where the population is almost split equally in french and english). Eh?
I often find myself writing in english using constructs that derrive from programming languages. My syntax is also affected once in a while.
For example, while writing some non-techical text (say, a letter to a friend of mine in the states somewhere), it's not rare that I end up typing "this" as "this->"!
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:2)
Re:Oh and another thing... (Score:2)
Re:Speek english (Score:2)
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:2)
As opposed to the American/English approach (inherited from our German side, in spite of the French/Latin connection) of generating compound words.
Which is where our modern computer language names come from, especially when you add typists's lazyness to it (print_formatted -> printf).
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:2)
It's a kind of politeness inflation
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:2)
In object-oriented Perl you already can choose whether to put the verb at the beginning or the end (at least a little). For example, if you're using the IO::Handle module and you want to make standard output unbuffered:
STDOUT->autoflush();or
autoflush STDOUT;
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:2)
So does PostScript.
(sorta)
Re:Non-English programming languages? (Score:2)
- The informal and formal forms of "you" (du and Sie). Perhaps you would use du with your PC, but I don't know I'd feel comfortable being so informal with an AS/400...
:)
- German doesn't quite have a generic "go" verb like English; one chooses a verb based on mode of transportation, which might be gehen, fahren or even fliegen or reiten, though perhaps springen would be more appropriate here...
- Most languages' distribution of default verb/preposition pairings is pretty arbitrary and not likely to make much sense to non-native speakers. The English preposition "to" gets translated to zu or nach (among others) in German depending on the verb and how it's used. Not that English is any less arbitrary, but it tends to rely on a smaller number of core prepositions.
I'm only being half-serious here, of course, but I think English, which has a less rigid word order than some other languages, is in some ways better suited as a source for the strange constructs of programming languages than a more rigid, highly inflected language. That being said, initial familiarity with the natural language on which a programming language is based probably only gains you the most minute and temporary of advantages. I'd probably be just as comfortable with C's smattering of reserved words if they were all in another language, or even just nonsense words. Where the language barrier really gets you are variable names and comments.--
Re:Japanese Perl? (Score:2)
It would probably look like C written by first-year CS students.
The Tyrrany Begins.... [fearbush.com]
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:2)
It helped me learn English (Score:2)
But it was good in the fact that it helped me learn English, specially in the 80s where most computer publications where only in that language.
Culture more important than language. (Score:2)
Where we have object oriented languages as a relatively recent phenom, I think that if the Japanese had created the languages they would have been done that way from the start.
With C/++ you have structs and classes, I think that if Japanese had created the languages you'd see things like teams. My idea for a team is an object which instead of attributes and functions would be made up of members with either abilities or data.
Take the STL string class for example. As I see it the string team would consist of two parts. The "string" portion of it would be a stand alone unit, maybe similar to a linked list of characters, with a member that consists of all of the string manipulation routines.
Since I speak very, VERY little Japanese, and can read/write NONE of it, I couldn't even guess as to what the Japanese names would be.
LK
What about Lojban? (Remember Heinlein?) (Score:2)
If you buy the book, I'd recommend buying it directly from The Logical Language Group [lojban.org], since you'll save money over the price Amazon charges (save about $6-8 with shipping), you'll probably get it sooner (that's where Amazon will get it from) and the authors get more money from the direct sale, since their wholesale cost to Amazon is less than the $39 they're charging directly... (They charged me $5 for shipping.)
Japanese ambiguous? Oh PLEASE! (Score:2)
The very idea that they need English to communicate efficiently is ridiculous. You can not run an army without efficient communication. You can not build an empire on ambiguity. Just because their culture includes cordial formalisms that put English to shame, does not mean that Japanese is in any way ambiguous. On the contrary, the language is so effective that it was perfectly acceptable to make it ornamental and courteous.
Many Americans seem to think that the whole world used to live in caves before America came into being. The world on the far side of either pond has been there a lot longer than we have, and the only thing of ours anyone out there benefits from is dollars.
Re: No, really. (Score:2)
Bilingual Japanese programmers I know, though, say that English is much more direct and easier to understand, even for programming manuals! Apparently the Japanese tendency to soften things and use implicit rather than explicit forms extends even to technical writing.
And Japanese writing is, IMHO, a pig. There's a reason that the Jesuit missionaries declared it to be a language devised by the devil himself!
Unlike Chinese, which usually has one sound per character, and hence about 6,000 commonly-used characters, Japanese has 2,000 common characters, each with multiple pronunciations.
"Is this character pronounced 'i' or 'o' or 'u' or 'ha' or 'ki' or 'nama' or 'na' or 'mu' or 'sei' or 'shou'"?
Yes.
Graham
Sapir-Whorf all over again (Score:2)
The only problem is that no linguist who has done any serious experimentation on the subject has been able to support Sapir-Whorf to any reasonable degree. Furthermore, they pretty much managed to undermine their own argument: in saying that an Inuit might have one word for snow lying on the ground, and another for snow falling, for example, you can see that we don't need a specific lexeme to grok the difference between falling snow and lying snow.
With that in mind, I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that language ain't got much to do with it. Maybe our keyboards would look different, and we'd all having Unicode [internet.com] native operating systems - which, now that I think about it, would be pretty damn cool - but I don't see that programming languages would be otherwise greatly affected.
PORTUGOL (Score:2)
PORTUGOL has been focused, lately, on educational goals. Oddly, I've presented an alpha version to some (Portuguese-speaking) college kids with some advanced math knowledge but no programming experience, and they've taken it to it quite easily; with my help, they grokked most of the system in a couple of hours. This is excellent time, especially compared to the ye^H^Hmo^H^Hwe^H^Hdays it takes for one to learn rudimentary C.
Anyone interested in PORTUGOL can email me here [mailto] and/or join the Cat's Eye Language List [mailto].
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:2)
(Chinese and Japanese are VERY different languages. It is as hard for a Japanese person to learn Chinese as it is for an English speaker.)
From the menu, you could tell that a dish would be chicken, beef, fish, whatever... That's because the Japanese adopted the characters, but not the pronunciation, from the Chinese. (With exceptions, of course.)
Cheers,
Jim
Re:chinese (Score:2)
* Single-character variable names would be quite descriptive, because single characters in Chinese are often whole words. So you'd get single-character names like "index", "flag" and so forth.
* There would be less temptation to use obscure function names like "strncasecmp", even in the standard library. The Chinese equivalent of "strncasecmp" would probably be called "string number ignore case compare", in Chinese characters. You could probably work out what that function does without looking up a manual.
* You could write code with less comments. A grapefruit could probably tell you what the function "count characters in string" does.
--
English Bad? (Score:2)
Although it's facisnating to consider an alternative history of the computer where development took place in another language, there is a much less theoretical question we could be asking: Is English, as the standard language for programmers, holding us back? Is there another natural language which would be better for describing our concepts or which would be easily speakable yet more understandable to our machines? As for the later, Constructed Logical Languages [dmoz.org] would be a massive boon to speech input and machine translation.
Could someone point us to some research on the usefulness of certain languages for certain tasks? Obviously the less letters the smaller keyboards, but is French really better for poetry or Latin for science?
Just look at BASIC (Score:2)
FOR
WHILE
DIM (dimension)
INT (integer)
LONG
SHORT
STRUCT (structure)
etc. etc. etc.
All of these keywords are derived from the English language, and I'm sure that not all of them have a foreign language equivalent that would be easily understood and translated. In short, if C or BASIC were developed in a non-English speaking country, then it's obvious that many of the keywords would be different, and (in the case of BASIC) some of the structure and syntax would be different too.
C: wrong example (Score:2)
Yoda C: {stuff1}[OR]{stuff2}[WHEN](!expression)
Now, take COBOL. Please take it. Rigorous English appearance, but strict grammar rules. COBOL would be different simply because the grammar would have been designed for whatever language its creator used. It happened to be American. I can hardly wait for Microsoft Cobolscript web pages. [Yes, I know Cobolscript exists]
Q: What do you call... (Score:2)
A: Bicurious!
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:2)
Re:Would it be better? (Score:2)
In general, I expect that English forms a much better basis for a computer language for only one reason: Parts of speech in English are positionally determined rather than being determined by form as they would be in Japanese, Latin, or other "inflected" languages.
How would you like to write a parser where you don't know the order of the operators and/or data? My guess is that regardless of the features of the natural language, we'd end up with something like we've got just because it makes writing the laguage parsers so much easier. Whether this will change in the future is an interesting topic for speculation.
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:3)
There are approximately 2000 "daily use" kanji officially sanctioned by the government, out of a total of around 30,000 Chinese characters. All words in the Japanese language are usually represented by a combination of these 2000 daily use characters, or by using one of the phonetic alphabets. There are, of course, a few exceptions when dealing with names, advertising and the like.
However, these characters still carry significantly more information than English letters. Japanese books are much shorter in length than their English counterparts, simply because it takes fewer characters to relay the same amount of information. On a related note, Japanese can typically read their native language much faster than native English speakers can read English, because it is very easy to "scan" the characters and pick up what is being conveyed. When I was learning Japanese my professor would always chide us for speaking the words (aloud or in our heads) while we were reading, as it was actually slowing down the intake of what was on the page.
At the lowest level, each character in the phonetic alphabets (hiragana and katakana) typically represents a combination of 2 English letters. At a much higher level, a single kanji character can represent an idea, with combinations of these expressing more complex concepts.
Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis; Ruby (Score:3)
As far as computer languages are concerned, an interesting language to check out might be Ruby, which was invented in Japan. I believe it is a souped-up scripting language, kind of like Python, but I hear that it has a number of unusual features.
Re:wouldnt the input be different as well? (Score:3)
Not quite. Programing languages are all turing compatable, and it can be proven you can translate from one to anouther correctly. Bablefish doesn't do a very good job of translating english to german (or back), and both those languages are based from latin roots.
What this means to you is that if I teach you C, to the point that you become good at it, I can teach you perl, APL, and several other languages in very little time. (In school I had a class that covered 12 languages in 10 weeks) If I tought you german it would help you to learn Danish, but it would still take you a while to learn Danish. I could then to Spanish and Portageese (very close), and you would learn faster. If I went on to Korean, Russian and (american) Indian, you would have little advantage over someone who had never learned anouther language. Some only because you wouldn't expect it to look like english.
In the last year I've used about equal amounts of TCL, Spanish, German, and C - almost no usage of any of them, and I used to know them all. If I needed to pick up one again I wouldn't have a problem picking up C or TCL, because I've been programing even though it is in a completely different language. Even though I spend more time speaking english then programing I'd have a hard time getting back to proficant with Spanish or German.
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:3)
Which is preceisely why I find the Churchill argument doubtful. If the langauge is good enough to give orders on factory floors, I doubt military work requires less ambiguity.
While many Japanese industrial processes were adopted from abroad, borrowing words has nothing to do with it. Most of the English words found in Japanese non-technical dictionaries were borrowed before WWII. Furthermore, adopting English words does nothing to change ambiguity. Anything that can be accomplished using an English word could be accomplished using a Japanese one, so long as the speakers agree to that code.
Re: No, really. (Score:3)
Re:Japanese Perl? (Score:3)
Ruby is written by a Japanese programmer, and to me it looks just like a kinder, gentler perl. If you read the docs comparisons to Perl are frequently made.
I wouldn't know how Japanese as a natural language influenced the Ruby language though.
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:3)
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:3)
By using English to describe any concept that couldn't be clearly expressed in Japanese. Keep in mind, most Japanese industrial leaders (in the 1950s), and much of their middle management, were trained in America. This is for their post-war development, and the eventual introduction of "quality" to Japanese work (which didn't exist prior to the 1960s).
As for productivity? Well, the other side of it is that the Japanese have an affinity for management and control systems that's far more efficient than ours. Controlling people is something that can be done in any language.
Hrmm.. (Score:3)
Re:Perl in Japanese? (Score:3)
Most kanji have more than one reading, and many times more than one reading is valid in a given context.
Hmmm... and in Perl, There's More Than One Way To Do It. Go figure.
Nope - the two are entirely reversed. In Perl (and pretty much any computer language given a sufficiently complex task), there is more than one way to phrase a single solution. In most human languages, any given single statement has multiple meanings.
Many beautiful phrases are nonsensical in mathematical or computer terms. Oftimes that is because you are leaping into connotations rather than meanings. "Revenge is a dish best served cold". Revenge is not a dish, and cold here does not refer to temperature.
Other times, you are referring to multiple meanings to create ambiguity - not a useful thing when telling a computer what to do, but a condition that the human mind seems to enjoy parsing, either as humor or depth: "A man walks into a bar. Ouch." That last word forces the mind to have to reparse the previous sentence, and realise its inherent ambiguity.
And then there is the pure nonsense that causes the mind to attempt to parse using all past experience a new item: "Twas brillig and the slily toves did gyre and gimbal in the wabe". Or a justiposition of inappropriate timing: In Clerks the Animated Series, at the end of the Anime sequence, as they stand in victory, give a hearty thumbs up and jubilantly yell "Oh, No!". That's what makes reading poor translations fun.
--
Evan "Who intentionally misspells his handle for a unique string"
CS in Translation (Score:3)
The course was taught using Pascal, which gave me an advantage because, as the post mentions, it's basically English. Of course, the course was taught in German, which took that advantage away again...
I think that you'll find that it's the higher level languages that take the most content from the spoken language of their author. Assembler, while mneumonically based on English, is simple enough that that shouldn't be a problem. And, of course, machine language itself has no real influence from spoken language. Also, something highly mathematical (and abstract) like APL will probably have little language-related learning curve.
LISP is an interesting case as well. It's higher-level, but pretty abstract. It's reportedly impossible to learn if you come from a culture that doesn't have parenthesis, or one that pronounces them as a "click".
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bukra fil mish mish
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Monitor the Web, or Track your site!
I don't know about ambiguity, but... (Score:3)
I suspect that this might have added somewhat to the top-down military structure, and further restricted the ability of individual units to improvise in a coordinated manner. Of course, that's hard to say, as this was already something of a feature of the Japanese military. This isn't to say that it's strictly a negative thing, there are advantages and disadvantages to having troops either more or less willing to strike out on their own when they think they know better than their commanders (either way, any military operation usually has some spectacular screw-ups caused by this feature).
As for those other replies that dismiss Churchill's comments as wrong in principle or "just plain racist", with the implication that all languages are alike, I would insist that there are very significant differences in the capabilities of languages. This requires different amounts of training to learn the specialized sub-language of any new field. There's a reason you can't understand what the drill sergeant is yelling, or the impenetrable babble of doctors in emergency surgery ("sew up that hole", "give him some painkillers", "saw off his foot", "he bumped his noggin").
If daily Japanese speech is more different from Japanese military commands than daily English speech from English military commands, it's going to take more training to learn a large and flexible vocabulary, so this ability will tend to be restricted to higher ranks.
Churchill was exaggerating, if not flat-out wrong (after all, ambiguity is a special feature of Japanese, but it is also purely optional), but IMHO it's at least plausible that the features of the language were a factor in the organization of the Japanese military.
---
Despite rumors to the contrary, I am not a turnip.
Re:Sanskrit for computers (Score:3)
Sanskrit is essentially a simplified form of proto-indo-european (the mother of all indo-european languages). Essentially, much of the tense structure was lost (my Sanskrit grammar is a bit rusty but I seem to remember that the optative and subjunctive hardly had any other tenses than the present), the syntax was slightly altered (for example, the genitive case has gobbled many of the uses of the other cases) and the morphology evolved (all vowels merged to 'a'; a new 'e' and 'o' were formed from vowel+sonant diphtongs, and consants multiplied by palatalization among other things).
Anyway, the point of my saying all this is not merely to brag about my knowledge of Sanskrit philology, but merely to point out that Sanskrit is a rather ordinary ancient indo-european language. Much of what you point out about it could be said of ancient Greek or even Latin. And, more importantly, being an indo-european language, it does not differ that much from English in its basic ideas. So I don't think it would bring you closer to "enlightenment" (in the sense of losing your linguistic prejudices) except perhaps in the spiritual sense of the word (Sanskrit is a "sacred" language :-).
Speaking 3 languages I really don't think so ! (Score:3)
But I believe that the "pragmatic" nature of english has really influenced the way people think and solve computer problems. Eglish is really efficien compared to Arabic and French which tend to be much more "constipated" languages, as they feel attaqued by english, they don't tend to evolve very quickly and tend to be conservative, they don't adapt naturally to technologic evolution, as the pramatic and conquerant english
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:3)
I watched a two part documentary entitled "Hiroshima" on the nuclear bombings and the events that led up to it recently and actually what did happen was this:
1. The Emperor, the Japanese Prime Minister, and basically everyone in the Japanese Government except the Army wanted to end the war and accept the allies unconditional surrender, but the Army seemed to have a stiff control over the government.
2. The Japanese Prime Minister addressed the millitary over the radio, and when asked what he thought of the allies unconditional surrender ultimatum he used the word (if I remember correctly) Matsato, he said it to appease the troops and didn't think the allies would listen. He wanted to end the war.
3. The allies were listening and couldn't immediately translate it, they brought in a Japanese linguist who said the word meant "to silently refuse", or it could have meant "to silently refuse in hopes of a better offer", but that was unlikely, Truman accepted the first meaning, and then signed off on dropping the bombs.
-- iCEBaLM
The syntax of natural language!=structural syntax (Score:3)
If English language should have had any impact on the design of a structural language, the syntax would be more like.
Consider this:
old_a=a;
b=func(&a);
if (a>b)
a=old_a;
Well if the language should be more natural it would look more like this:
old_a => a. /* put old_a into a. */ /* give addr. of a to func and
execute and put the return
into b. */ /* Is a > b ? then put old_a
into a. */
&a @ func => b.
a>b ? old_a => a : .
The abstraction in the (C like) programming language comes from math more than from the natural language and is far more infruenced by math notation than English.
Even OOP is far from the natural language (maybe except Perl). If we try to write a sentence like "Peter gave his Mother the basket" would likely look like this in C++
Peter->give(basket, Mother);
But despite the order of words, the logic is quite different. What is "basket" here? it is a variable holding a reference to an object. Why is it name basket, a part from giving us a clue here? Well, it probably is a generic object pointer that could refer to anything else than the basket. How is basket related to Peter? Is it part of his "inventory"?
object = Peter->loose_item_by_name("basket");
Peter->give(Mother, object);
Now more like it, but we are now leaving the abstraction, that natural language gives. Experiments have been made to make a language less formal, but often they strand on being ambigeous, an issue we deal with in everyday communication without a thought, but if our language wasn't ambigeous, we would be very longish and convoluted in expressing even simple meanings.
Our language consists of three basic kinds of utterations: Statements ("I am hungry.", "The boy was naughty to his Mother"), questions ("Are you hungry?", "To whom was the boy naughty?"), and imperatives ("Pass the butter!", "Please be nice to your Mother!"). Even when questions are expressed like statements ("I wonder if you know how it hurts.") or imperatives like questions ("Would you mind to be more causeous?") we still destinct them quite well, and no further kinds utterations exists.
But computer languages are often separated into query languages, declarative languages and imperative languages and they don't mix well. Look at the C++ example; the imperative language cannot express a (real) statement: I have come to know, that Peter gave his Mother the basket. Even questions are not questions, they are requests for boolean evaluation.
AI is getting better and better results in simulate a conversation, but it is not suited for programming languages, because a program is not a conversation. I ask the computer a question in a program, but an intelligent answer requires an understanding of the context and can hardly be used as a condition, since the answer may be "It depends on other premises."
An idea is, that programming should within time be substituted with communicating values and wishes, that in a fuzzy way gets to actions by the computer that will make us happy, like a manager communicating with his secretary. This may happen some day.
100+ comments and... (Score:3)
Not a single Perl Haiku to be found? C'mon people!
Re:klingon-based programming... (Score:3)
Top 12 things likely to be overheard if you worked with a Klingon Programmer:
PL's not closely tied to NL's (Score:3)
Most programing languages don't have cases. The first basic I used had two (numeric and string). Unix shells have two (assignment and reference). Perl has several, but English speakers have no more trouble with this than a native speaker of a language with cases. Larry Wall probably knew what he was doing: he studied linguistics, and probably realized that a case system makes it easier to recognize mistakes.
Spelling and phonetics don't matter in a purely written programming language, so the most important classification for natural languages that would apply would probably be word order. Most programming languages do roughly follow English's SVO word order, like "x equals 4". They tend to put modifiers like array indices at the end, like english uses postfixes.
If we read "function(x)" as "ask function x", we can read namespace::object->function(x) as "ask namespace's object's function x", but in another language, we might have to change the order to "ask the function of object of namespace x".
Consider "program arguments out_file". You can read it in english as "program arguments from in_file to out_file". In japanese, you would say, "in_file from out_file to arguments program".
But, if you look at non-imperitive languages, you would think they aren't designed by english speakers. Most assembly is VSO, and is difficult to read aloud in english. Lisp is more or less VSO, and has a complicated syntax that allows you to build phrases of indefinite length. Lisp might make more sense to a German speaker than and English speaker.
Variables and functions can be considered a type of pronoun, where any word that isn't in the language is assumed to be a pronoun.
Just some ideas.
Speek english (Score:3)
A: Trilingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speeks 2 languages.
A: Bilingual.
Q: What do you call a person who speeks 1 language.
A: American.
Re:Speek english (Score:3)
A: Cunnilingual!
Languages without nouns (Score:3)
Last night I was reading Jorge Luis Borges' collection of short stories, Labyrinths [amazon.co.uk]. One story involves (amongst other things) a language without nouns like "moon", instead using verbs to describe the action of "to moonate" or the state of "mooning".
It struck me whilst reading that this wasn't too far from a stack-oriented language, like RPN or Forth. Unusually this is a case where a concept was probably more familiar to me now than it was to Borges (famously fond of obscure references) when he wrote it.
Re:Non-English programming languages? (Score:3)
There's more to a programming language than the words (or lexical tokens) that describe the syntax. The interesting difference is not whether the reserved word is spelled IF or SI, but the semantic differences of the language's underlying structure. Don't confuse the semantic data model with the mere serialisation (as you chose to mention XML).
Does German's infamous "verb at the end" form encourage functional programming ?
Is the Chinese context-dependent re-use of an pictogram a model of polymorphism ?
Are languages without a first-person inherently supportive of multi-processor systems ?
Could you program in Welsh, just by adding the suffix "io" to all the machine code opcodes ? 8-)
Japanese Perl? (Score:3)
Well, to an English speaker, it would probably look like line noise.
Rather like it does right now.
Re:Could you build a nonsymbolic language? (Score:3)
clause -> [object].. verb [tense]
sentence -> [object].. [clause conjunction].. clause term
While there are a few special cases, the overall language is extremely precise, and while fairly position independant when considering object position, specifies that the verb always concludes the clause.
A programming language stemming from a Korean-oriented mind might result in a language with a function call like such:
( "The time is: %t":fmt, [()time]:data )fmtstring;
-which is equivalent to-
( [()time]:data, "The time is: %t":fmt)fmtstring;
As opposed to English, which is relatively position-dependant in syntax:
fmtstring( "The time is: %t", [time()] )
Of course, it's interesting to note that many procedural languages have adopted the (
Re:Sanskrit for computers (Score:3)
points of dispute
"There is absolutely no ambiguity."
You have got to be kidding me. Take a look at 3 or 4 translations of the same passage from the Upanishads, for example. There are often wide variations in interpretation. It its later years, sanskrit words were intentionally layered with multiple meanings, and authors used these to create richness of texture which is impossible to translate. Few translators catch all of the references, even in a common text such as the Bhagavad-gita.
Perhaps, but also with an incredible amount of irregularity. The nominal cases you are talking about are monolithic forms of what we would use combinations of connecting words for. For example, rather than having a locative case of the noun 'house', we say "in the house." There's a reason languages became more modular: modularity makes things more flexible, easier to deal with and to understand.
Note that computer languages have evolved in much the same way, especially if you view the object-oriented paradigm as an extension of modularity.
Don't get me wrong, I love sanskrit. (is it obvious?) However, I think all in all it's just as well we don't speak it much anymore.
Sanskrit is essentially a simplified form of proto-indo-european
Simplified??????
When you make generalizations about declinsions that were lost and so on, remember that there were many various periods of sanskrit, and certain cases that were more prominent earlier on got lost later on, and so forth. In this aspect, there may be more differences between early & later sanskrit than between sanskrit and another language.
what you're all missing....
Look at sanskrit, where is all the power? In the noun. Look at spanish, where is all the power? In the verb.
For example, in the entire 180-some-odd verses of the yoga sutras, there are something like 2 verbs.
Just like in computer languages, we have the Object-oriented approach, (noun) and the functional approach (verb).
I have a lot more to say about it, but this message is long enough!
check out my mp3 page [mp3.com]
Natural Languages and Software Development (Score:3)
klingon-based programming... (Score:3)
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Programming IS a different language... (Score:3)
The only real difference is that there is no compiler for the spoken language.
--
Re:klingon-based programming... (Score:3)
Actually, this is precisely why I created var'aq in the first place -- to investigate what a computer language created by a non-English speaker might look like.
An awful lot like PostScript, it turns out, if you're a Klingon...
One of my coauthors, Chris Pressey (see www.catseye.mb.ca if you're not familiar with his work) has even suggested trying to create a language with an inflected grammar like Latin (I've even thought of basing one on Latin; its working name is SPQL, but I don't know if I'll ever get around to creating it). Imagine what that parser would look like -- you sure as hell couldn't do it easily in yacc.
But I'm glad someone brought it up -- I was going to, but hey, if someone else is tooting my horn...
/Brian
English (Score:3)
I happen to work with a woman from Thailand, and her variable names are all but impossible to determine meaning from. I would have thought that Thai could not exist with only the latin alphabet, but I've been proven wrong.
As for how things would be different if the majority of code was written in a different language (that a majority of programmers understood, much like English is today), I really think it would make very little difference. True, some languages express certain emotions, situations, etc. a little more precisely than English, but usually an example can be given comparing the same language in which English has a more detailed expression in describing something.
As for Perl, show my mom a program written in Perl and a French poem, and I guarantee you the Perl will look more foreign to her than the French. It's all perspective.
Re:Japanese Perl (Score:3)
I once read that good chess players learn to recognize patterns on the board, and build up a simpler model based on those patterns.
I am now going to speculate that what may make a good programmer is the ability to build up a mental model of a problem using a similar thought pattern. Basically, you break down the problem into chunks that you understand and, more importantly, you know how to glue those chunks together. You then create a program out of those chunks, and the optimized glue. The emphasis on algorithms and object-oriented programming supports this notion (though it is only a notion).
So, how a native language would effect programming would be more in what sort of natural chunks does the native language have? I don't know enough linguistics to answer this.
APL, LISP, The Matrix and the need for AI (Score:4)
If we were able to divorce ourselves from our language, and design a language centered on computational concepts, rather than linguistic ones, then that language would likely look a lot like APL, or LISP, or those funky squiggles we saw in The Matrix.
It's a hard thing for people to do, separating ourselves from language. Even those of us who speak more than one language fluently, tend to THINK IN A LANGUAGE. Yes, we all perceive concepts abstractly, but we formalise and represent them, inside our own heads, using a language. Communicating is something we do naturally, and we communicate with sounds and printable characters. It's just a part of our biological wiring.
One interesting line from The Matrix sticks out when we think about this: The first 'Matrix' failed because, "some thought we lacked the language to represent your puny little world".. Or something to that effect. The machines considered creating a new language that would have a greater level of semantic richness to describe the problem.
This is an interesting idea, since human languages, all of them, evolved to describe the 'natural world'. We have no problem with understanding the causality of if-then, do-while or has-a and is-a... Even the concepts of OOP are 'natural'. Encapsulation, inheritance, aggregation, these are all natural concepts derived from the natural world and described with natural language. Any human language should be able to describe the world, and so any can be used for programming. The structure of programming languages would not be very different, because they are developed by beings who think in a language used to describe the natural world. {whew}
Now the neat part: What would a language be like if it were designed from the ground-up to be centered on computational concepts, and not those of the 'natural' world?
It would look like APL, with it's huge number of characters used to describe complex ideas that take many words to explain to people. If-Then is easy to explain to a newbie. How do you explain tail-recursion, or semantic closure? How do you concisely respresent a colored-tree (tertiary or more) without using the metaphor of trees and colors?
A language developed in a natural language other than English would not be all that different that what we're used to. (Not that PERL looks anything like English to begin with.
A language designed around computational concepts would look cryptic and superbly compact. The idea of programming patterns could potentially be represented as a single character, or a small set of glyphs which would require a long verbalization to translate into a human language. Such a language would likely be LISPish in structure, where instructions and data would blend seamlessly into each other.
This language would probably use coding-time translation tables and run-length instruction encoding in source, and would build complex concepts from little ones whenever needed; much like we do with functions, but from a much finer, to a much broader scale. This language would be self-referential, self-describing and self-modifying.
A langauge like this could not be designed by a human, because we are by definition prejudiced towards 'natural' languages. A computationaly centrered language could only be written by a machine which itself would have the capacity for manipulating abstract concepts. A pretty tall order.
A programming language designed by the ancient Celts, the Arabs, the Japanese or Babylonians would certainly APPEAR very different from Java, but after translating it - it would be simple to understand. A language built on un-'natural' concepts might not be comprehensible because it might include concepts we can not conceive of.
Time to re-read "Godel, Escher, Bach" one more time.
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:4)
I can imagine this conversation between two native speakers of Japanese:
"English is a really ambiguous language. It doesn't have words for politeness levels."
"Actually, it does have words like 'sir', 'madam', and 'boy', but for some reason, people don't use them. I guess they just deduce the politeness level from context."
And if this were the 1980s rather than the 2000s, the conversation could go on: "Maybe that's why Japanese manufacturing firms are kicking the Americans' butts -- since the English language doesn't mark politeness distinctions clearly, American workers don't respect their bosses as much as Japanese workers do."
--
Re:Japanese Perl: syntax example (Score:4)
I speak a little Japanese from what I took in college, and there are some unique features of the language that might effect syntactical structure.
For instance, the acting verb in a sentence almost always occurs at the end of a sentence. To use English with Japanese grammer, the sentence, "I use Perl," would roughly reconfigure as, "I Perl Use."
This may have the effect on function definition and usage. Perhaps this would be the case:
{
argument++;
} function (&argument) increment;
i = 0;
((i)increment)print;
I think the one other good way to trace or guess as to the syntactic etomology of a programming language would be to look at that nation's written mathimatic syntax, as many computer languages stem from math notations.
-AP
Nice timing (Score:4)
First, people don't think in the language they speak in. When you think about a dog eating ice cream you don't literally think the words "The dog is eating ice cream". There is some "mentalese" that you are actually using. When you decide to speak aloud, you translate this mentalese into your language of choice (English, for me). My understanding of Pinker's explanation of Chomsky is that everybody has the same mentalese.
That said, here is my addenda to Pinker's explanation of Chomsky's theory (with help from Church-Turing) would be: All programming languages are equally powerful and isomorphic. This indicates that there is some abstract "algorithmese" that all programmers (can) think in. Therefore, while it may be the case that C is especially close to English*, but if so it doesn't really matter.
*I doubt this is the case. C is very verb-oriented: printf(the_data). C++ is very noun-oriented: the_data.print.
--
Obvious answer (Score:4)
Re:Obvious answer (Score:4)
Programming languages only use the same "nouns" as natural languages, and some of the same verbs. In English, we share nouns and verbs with other languages, but that doesn't make the languages equivalent.
Programming is based highly on math and logic. In fact, thats all it really is. It is a differnt language not based on natural language. As such...a MUCH more interesting topic....
what is the effect of programming languages on thought? Using a language and becoming fluent in it, requires the brain to think in a different way. It has been said that language shapes thought.
There is talk of "Geeks" and "normal people". Perhaps this is a construct not of us being different and learning about programming and administration etc, but that we learn it, and it has changed us. We have a plethora of similar languages of our own, even when not programming we talk with a vocabulary and litterary tradition that, to many people, sounds liek a whole other language, or culture.
I worry about this of late. Look around at how common this is. Turn the focus to law for a min. Do laws get written in normal english? No...they get written in a kind of sub language, by people of another culture, a legal culture. Perhaps their thinking has been shaped by their language, and their patterns of operation? Could that be the link to the reason that those in power and the common man don't seem to understand eachother? Different cultures, different languages (similar but different in usage and somewhat in definitions).
The more I look, the larger the implications get, and the more true it apears. Perhaps it is a good model...then again...perhaps its that damned law of fives all over again.
Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:4)
In his The Second World War (a six-volume set mainly of his memos as Prime Minister and Minister of Defense for GB during that war) he attributes the collaspe of the Japanese Navy's offensive strategy in the South Pacific (particularly the setback in the Coral Sea in 1942) to the ambiguties of the Japanese language. In substance he said the Japanese had to withdraw and regroup whenever a tactical plan met with an obstacle because of language ambiguities, while the English-speakers could communicate in clear, definite fashion to make ad-hoc adjustments as needed.
IANALinguist, but I found Churchill's comments fascinating. If some Japanese-speaking /. community-members want to refute this notion, please do. (I'm not proposing it is true, only reporting what the Prime Minister said).
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Smalltalk and Ojibwe (Score:4)
To me, I see Smalltalk as resembling the language of the Ojibwe people, a Native American tribe which lived in parts of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Canada. While I'm not an expert in Ojibwe (having only one semester worth), I have a basic understanding of the general mechanisms of it. Ojibwe is very modular and simply sytactically, much like Smalltalk, whereas english is simple sometimes, but there are many gotchas even in simple constructs.
Ojibwe has the concepts of a pre-verb, that is, a one syllabal modifier of the verb, to change context. They declare future and past tenses, as the desire-to-perform-the-verb, the probability-the-verb-will-happen and others. It'd be an interesting idea to introduce to a language- small messages to an object to change context it's recieving it. Perhaps something like "(anObject become: somethingElse) doThis". Currently not used often, using them as a fundament of design might develop a new way of solving problems and coding the solution.
Nindigoo ojibwemong Enigoons. Giga-waabamin!
Re:Japanese Perl? (Score:4)
Wouldn't-be-too-different-if-it-was-German (Score:4)
languages similar to natural English:
(1) English is almost inflection-free, which means
(2) that it has to have a strict word ordering
(3) which make programming languages simple to parse
German, however, has case markers and therefore
free word ordering.
So, in principle, you could exploit that feature
in a natural-language-like programming language:
ASSIGN value TO variable
WEISE der Variablen den Wert ZU
WEISE den Wert der Variablen ZU
which would be unambigious in German.
However, the case markers in German are in many cases bound to the articles, and usually, one just would have something like
ASSIGN b TO a
WEISE a b ZU
where the case markers have disappeared, so
even the German version would have to rely on a
(previously agreed upon) word order.
Thus, the strict word ordering of today's English-like language seems pretty inevitable to me.
However, if we leave the realm of Indoeuropean
languages with its "a does b to c" scheme, the
question would certainly be a different one.
Agglutinating languages? Non-ergative languages?
They probably might have developed a totally
different concept of writing down algorithms
(or might even have developed a non-von-Neumannian
machine).
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:5)
I, however, am a linguist, although I am not fluent in Japanese, and I find the argument extremely doubtful. I've never heard of any effective way of measuring ambiguity in a whole language. Language as a tool of communication generally adapts to serve the users' needs. If it needs precision, precise codes are adopted by the speakers. If the Japanese navy had problems communicating clear orders, I'd look to their training and communications practices, not the language itself.
If the Japanese language was too ambiguous to give clear orders, how on earth could Japan in the space of 40 years develop a very productive, highly advanced industrial system?
Take great care in evaluating arguments that claim one language's superiority over another on some internal basis. I've heard a lot of them and I've never seen one that could stand up to any scientific test.
Lingua::Romana::Perligata (Score:5)
Damian gave a talk on the module at the O'Reilly Perl Conference, but unfortunately neither the talk nor the module is available on-line. He said he was going to post the module to CPAN, too... Maybe it's time to bug him about that.
Anyway, a person who attended the conference faxed me his paper for the speech; if you're interested, e-mail me (after de-spam-proofing my address), and I will fax it to you.
Vovida, OS VoIP
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Formal Perl (Score:5)
Men and women would also have different vocabularies. It would be considered improper for a male to use "Ladies' Perl" in most computer environments (except perhaps the Mac).
Japanese Perl (Score:5)
Of course, the opposite would happen with German Perl. You'd create new words by concatenating existing ones, so you'd have a word 4,000 characters long which would do everything related to a specific task -- change one of the component phrases and the new word does something related yet different.
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:5)
It definitely helps to shout if you're an English speaker. Whenever I've been in Europe and the locals haven't understood me, I've just shouted louder...
Re:It won't matter (Score:5)
Languages like Japanese (for example) have a completely different grammatical syntax than English. But then again, so does programming... The difference between coding in one langauge or another is mainly syntax and vocabulary, just like with the differences in spoken languages.
However, all programming languages are meant to make it easier for the programmer to communicate with the machine. Since it all gets converted into machine language anyway, most programming languages have a syntax that is more mathematical. So, even if our founding coders spoke a completely different language, the syntax would probably have been based on mathematics.
This leaves only the vocabulary to be a little different... meaning that we would probably only have different keywords.
Sanskrit for computers (Score:5)
The grammar of Sanskrit is very tough to learn since it is very vast and there are a lot of things to remember than in a language like English (somewhat like C++ being more complicated than C). But it's all very very logical and straightforward. The main thing is that there are a lot of forms of the same word. For example, udyanam means garden; udyanasya means "of the garden", udyanat means "from the garden" , and so on. There are several forms of the same noun. Each form has a unique meaning, and each meaning has a unique form. There is absolutely no ambiguity. Same for verbs and adjectives and other language constructs.
One beauty of this uniqueness is the fact that now the order of the words in the sentence doesn't matter at all. For example, consider that you want to say "I am going to the garden." Aham is I, udyanam is garden, gacchami is going. So I would say, Aham udyanam gacchami. Now I could also say that udyanam gacchami aham or gacchami aham udyanam or any permutation, all of which mean exactly the same thing. Taking this one step further, I could simply say udyanam gacchami since the verb gacchami implies the "I". If it was somebody else who was going to the garden, I would have to say gacchati, and if it were you, I would have to say gacchasi so the verb form implicity determines the subject.
This is just a novice example of the fact that a lot of semantic information is built into the syntax of Sanskrit in a very elegant way that would appeal to purists and compiler designers. I believe that natural language parsing of English and other European languages is much tougher than parsing Sanskrit would be. The downside to adopting Sanskrit would be the vast number of grammar rules and verb and noun forms that have to be learnt.
Professors in the few universities in India where Sanskrit is still being taught strongly advocate the use of Sanskrit for computing. I just know high-school level novice Sanskrit, so if there are Sanskrit gurus among you, speak out with more relevant details.
Anoop Iyer
Re:Winston Churchill on Japanese "Ambiguity" (Score:5)
In the meantime, I'd like to quickly post that when it comes to military commands, the Japense military, much like any military, had short, descriptive commands that were to the point. If anything, I would think that the tactical limitations came from the inability of individual soldiers to act on their own accord, because of the absolute authority of their C.O. Tactical changes would have to go through many levels before it was approved.
Having said that, I will admit the Japanese are very good at being ambiguous if they want to be, and the language definitely supports that. Being blunt was seen as something the "common" man would do back in the day of the royalty, and hence the attempt to speak in poems, etc, etc... And... no offense, but poetry, as much as I enjoy it, can be about as ambiguous as it gets.
In order not to receive an OT-mark, I will say that the Japanese, in general, code very well, and I haev no problems reading it. I wonder if they're just that "type" of person, or if the Engligh language helps them be blunt/clear/etc...
Re:Non-English programming languages? (Score:5)
This made for a really, really cool demo, especially for Japanese people who read little English. I did this a number of times for people and their eyes lit up rreally wide, and I could tell they were thinking "so that's what all that gobbledygook programming stuff means... "
Non-English dialects were killed from AppleScript two years ago, likely because it was too much effort to support. But it was way cool.
- Olof